The U.S. “already won” the war in Iran, President Donald Trump told Newsmax in an interview on Thursday, claiming Washington had destroyed Tehran’s navy, air force, air defenses, radar systems, and leadership, but said he wanted to secure victory by a “bigger margin.”
“We’ve already won, but I want to win by a bigger margin. We have destroyed their navy, destroyed their air force, destroyed all of their – if you look at their anti-aircraft equipment, their radar equipment, their leadership. Their leadership is destroyed. We’ve destroyed everything,” the US leader said.
While he said Iran suffered severe losses, he stressed it would take Tehran two decades to recover from the war.
“If we leave right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild, if they ever could rebuild,” Trump said in the interview.
Despite this, the US president insisted this is “not good enough” and there must be guarantees that Iran would not have a nuclear weapon.
“But it’s actually not good enough,” he said. “We have to have guarantees they will never have a nuclear weapon.”
Meanwhile, Trump said Iran is facing severe economic pressure amid the ongoing blockade imposed by the US in the Strait of Hormuz.
“Right now, their economy is collapsing, inflation is at close to 100 percent,” he said. “They can’t do any oil because we have a blockade that’s 100 percent effective.”
Iran’s supreme leader defiantly vowed Thursday to protect the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and missile capabilities, which Trump has sought to curtail through airstrikes and as part of a wider deal to cement the war’s shaky ceasefire.
In a statement read by a state television anchor, Mojtaba Khamenei said the only place Americans belonged in the Gulf is “at the bottom of its waters” and that a “new chapter” was being written in the region’s history. Khamenei has not been seen in public since taking over as supreme leader following the killing of his father in the war’s opening airstrikes.
His remarks come as Iran’s economy is reeling and its oil industry is being squeezed by the US Navy blockade halting its tankers from getting out to sea. The world economy is also under pressure as Iran maintains its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of all crude oil is transported. On Thursday, the global benchmark for oil, Brent crude, traded as high as $126 a barrel.
With the Associated Press